Studio
Gainesphere is a small media studio in Kansas City, Missouri, run by a 3D and stop-motion animator. At the core are VR game design and animation. Everything else we do grows out of those two.
Two main crafts, and a lot of trades around them. Each one feeds the others: the animation is in every game, the scans become places to walk, and the old arcade machines are the reference for all of it.
Main craft
VR games set in the places we grew up in, designed, built and tested here:
Main craft
The studio is run by an animator, and it shows in everything we make:
Older 3D work: characters, cartoons and rooms, modelled, lit and rendered here.
Band cartoon
Character test
Cartoon head
Lobby interior
Cathedral interior
TowerTrailers, promos and short animated videos, from storyboard and music to the finished cut, in widescreen, vertical and 3D.
Gaussian splats and 360 tours of real places. We scan homes, rentals and businesses around Kansas City.
Our own tools and engines: the MallVR engine, the Splat Walker app and its treadmill reader, and DOS Drive-In VR, whose source is on GitHub.
Original coloring books from Gainesphere Press: seasonal favourites, arcade nights, cryptids, UFOs, punk shows and hot rods.
Parts, mods and game-room goods for arcade cabinets. Can't find a part? Ask us; we've probably seen one.
The short story of 1990s arcade VR, in our own words, and the work to keep those games playable before the last machines are gone.
Gainesphere started as a maker shop: animation, arcade parts and books. The games grew out of that, and the 3D scanning grew out of the games. You can see the animation work in the portfolio.
Short, dated, and only about things that actually happened in the build. If it's a plan, we say it's a plan.
We now scan homes, rentals and businesses around Kansas City: 360 tours and full 3D walk-throughs, with the same camera and know-how we use for Splat Walker. Prices and examples.
A small desert ghost town we built ourselves, with buildings you can walk into. Walk it, ride through it, or play the splat games in it.
Paper runs and seed-bomb runs from a milk crate on your bike or scooter. A title screen and a short Basic menu, with the rest under Advanced. The big park now opens in about four seconds instead of over a minute. Plus our own synthwave soundtrack, and team colours that also work for colour-blind players.
Ride instead of walk: scooter, bikes, BMX, skates and boards, with tricks and a race mode. And a big park we built ourselves: a long outer loop, a running track, woods, a lake and a street of shops.
The 1990s VR arcade from MallVR is now a wing of the Starlite test build: ten pods that start our rebuilds of the pod games.
Mall hub, Crash Test Alley and Mall Walker now start from a single exe, in a headset or on a desktop. First owner playtest: the hub door into Crash Test Alley works, and the result board was hiding behind the distance board. Fixing that next, then the first ten minutes.
The grey placeholder mall is out; the two-level voxel Starlite Commons is now what you spawn into. Stores still need a lot of detail work. Also: little round things that roll at you in the dark hall are staying, by popular demand of one.
New PC build on the download page and a new Quest build. Fixes the menu freezing after your second game, adds borderless fullscreen, and the Lost Games that walk now walk like the originals did: stick to move, side-step, smooth turn.
Twelve pod games nobody has found a copy of, rebuilt from surviving footage as playable stand-ins with music. They're in the box and play right away. We'd still rather have the real ones; if you know where a copy lives, tell us.
$9.99 in our store. DOSBox-X underneath, our source on GitHub.
New builds, playtest calls and the longer write-ups go there before they go anywhere else.